Use the basic concepts and principles related to the selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation of physical and digital items and collections.

Introduction

Selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation describe the process of collection development.  Every information professional carries out these actions differently depending on their specific situation.  The process of selecting, evaluating, organizing, and preserving is constant and for any collection to be useful to its users it must be periodically maintained.  I am currently employed at SJSU’s Visual Resource Library (VRL) and because our collection consists entirely of digital images, the act of collection development and maintenance differs from what it might be in a library, but the major components remain the same.

In the VRL, images are added to our collection based primarily on what instructors need for their classes, but on occasion we do add images from areas where we feel they are lacking in order to round out our collection.  For example, even if they are not needed for a class we might add a selection of images of textiles so they are there if a student needs them for any reason.  Based on the way we believe users will search for our records in the VRL, we number them sequentially and do not use a classification system.  This works for our relatively small group of users because the majority of them search for a specific artist, style, or artwork and do not generally use our database to browse or discover new things.  With regard to preservation in a fully digital collection such as in the VRL, the main area of concern is having reliable backups for our database and our image server.  There are backups and redundancies in place in case a server should fail, though we are acutely aware of the fact that digital storage is far from perfect.  This is not just an issue with our particular library, it is one of the big issues the LIS field is attempting to tackle.

 

Evidence

Collection Development Policy for the San Jose Museum of Art

My first piece of evidence is a proposed research center for the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA).  SJMA is a contemporary art museum located in downtown San Jose that has some challenges but also some things that make it uniquely positioned to obtain and provide a collection of materials that are useful to scholars as well as the local community.

In keeping with the museum’s strategic plan, I created a policy that focuses on obtaining the personal papers and records of artists whose work is in the museum’s permanent collection with a focus on artists with ties to the Bay Area or the West Coast.

This piece of evidence also discusses the collection development policy as it relates to current theories of archival appraisal.

The Digital Future of Archival Appraisal

My second piece of evidence attempts to answer the question of what changes in archival appraisal we can expect in the future.  As it stands now archivists are dealing with media which is aging or already obsolete, and new born-digital media is being created ever more quickly leaving them to struggle to just keep up with it all.

Digital storage might seem like the perfect solution: it’s cheap and easily available, but our current technologies won’t be around forever.  What happens when a library or archives puts all of their resources into one format or another, only to have it become obsolete in a matter of years?

 

Professional Development

As I gain more experience with the process of collection development, it is my hope that I will be able to make decisions that benefit both my library and its patrons.  One of the ways I can do this is by using available resources such as journals and reviews to keep up with new publications, editions, or versions of materials already available in my library.  From there, I can then determine if something will be a suitable addition to a collection.